


Pride-and-Ego Down

by CyanideBreathmint



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Consensual sexual violence, Don't feel sorry for Ren he's a self-radicalized mass-murderer, Explicit Sexual Content, Just filth, M/M, No Angst, Not Safe For Humanity, Pre-Canon, Snoke Ships It, Spoilers, don't blame me blame hamartia, don't feel sorry for Hux he's an evil space Nazi, improper use of First Order interrogation equipment, sheer filth, utter trashy smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-07
Updated: 2016-01-07
Packaged: 2018-05-12 10:24:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,641
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5662864
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CyanideBreathmint/pseuds/CyanideBreathmint
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kylo Ren is dubious about the value of First Order officer resistance-to-interrogation training and it’s up to Hux to convince him otherwise.</p><div class="center">
  <p>---</p>
</div>Content warning for discussion of coercive interrogation techniques and sexual violence.<br/>Content warning for consensual acts of coercion, torture and sexual violence.<br/>Content warning for mild in-character dissociation.
            </blockquote>





	Pride-and-Ego Down

**Author's Note:**

> Title gleefully yoinked from the RL techniques used to glean information from captives by attacking their egos. 
> 
> This fic was inspired by discussion on Hux’s qualifications for officership and the music video for Rammstein’s _Du hast._ It can be assumed to take place as an interlude (interlewd?) in my series, _The Fox and the Wolf_ , between _Cold Feet_ and _Burning Heart._

General Hux was very much the exemplary First Order officer, save for one fact. He always forgot to use his leave days, which often left Administration tutting feebly in his direction near the end of each operational year as the unused leave time rolled over and then was lost as it approached the hard limit of 60 days. While he did not care much for Administration and their bureaucratic antics, they were the people who issued his salary, and eventually it just became more expedient to simply take a day or two off every month or so to use up excess leave time and also to catch up on sleep. 

Although, Hux mused, catching up on sleep was currently unfeasible with Kylo Ren curled up in bed beside him. Ren lay all knees and elbows in a loose attitude of relaxation, still half-dressed in the loose-fitting trousers he wore under his robes. Hux would have called him gangly in his tallness were it not for the grace and assurance with which he moved, deadly strength and power wrapped in coarse black robes. His curling black hair fanned out unruly on top of the pillow as he toyed idly with the buttons on Hux’s pyjama shirt. 

Hux chose to pay him no mind as he did so, concentrating instead on the dull gray slate he held in his left hand and the reports scrolling across its dimly glowing screen. He reached out with his right hand for the glass of water on his nightstand, found it and picked it up without having to look for it, and took a small sip. 

“Are you still reading reports on your leave, General?” Ren asked from his side of the bed after Hux had put the glass down.

“My leave doesn’t officially begin until midnight,” Hux told him. In truth he wasn’t quite that punctilious, but it amused him to tease and frustrate Ren somewhat. Besides, Ren got quite ardent when teased in the right ways, a fervor that made Hux’s skin tingle and took his breath away.

“You’re teasing me,” Ren said, rising up on his hands and knees to whisper the words into Hux’s ear, “I know it. It turns you on to control me.”

Hux struggled to keep his eyes on the slate and the report he was reading. “So you can read my thoughts, now,” he murmured in affected indifference as Ren nibbled at the shell of his ear, hot breath and teeth and velvet tongue pausing to linger at his earlobe, at the side of his neck.

“Just your surface feelings,” Ren panted softly, reaching up one-handed to turn Hux’s head slightly to steal a kiss. “And I don’t know if I can concentrate hard enough to do more right now.” 

_Neither can I,_ Hux thought but did not say as he put the slate down on his nightstand, and then Ren was half-straddling him, long clever fingers working eagerly at the buttons of his pyjama shirt. 

“I used to think your habit of sleeping in pyjamas was pointless and slightly silly,” Ren continued breathlessly, conversationally, “but it’s like those layers of uniform, isn’t it? Like gift wrap.” 

“It’s also because I get cold,” Hux gasped against Ren’s mouth as he slid his own fingers under the waistband of Ren’s trousers, “You’re not always here to keep me warm, you know.” 

“No,” Ren agreed, and then Hux was rolling him onto his back roughly, pushing him down into the sheets. 

“You look so pretty like that,” Hux told him as they stared briefly at each other, thought of all the things he could do to make Ren beg and moan and scream, “I just want to -”

“You want to ravish me and leave me defiled,” Ren said before Hux could finish the sentence, “You want to – ” 

“Get out of my head, Ren.” Hux paused to shrug off his open pyjama shirt, tugged at his pants, and Ren reached up to help him impatiently, tugging hard at the thin fabric as the waistband snagged on his proud erection.

“I don’t need to be in your head to see _this_ ,” Ren whispered as he took hold of Hux’s cock, squeezed hard enough to make him gasp. Ren laughed breathlessly in response to Hux’s sudden reaction, and there it was again, that smile, slightly snaggletoothed and awkward and utterly breathtaking.

Hux thought that it was a good thing the Knights of Ren went masked; that the First Order would be inundated with groupies if Kylo Ren made a regular habit of showing off that exquisite face where ever he went, and then Ren started moving his hand in long, slow strokes and Hux found it impossible to think at all. 

“I want to fuck you this time,” Hux heard Ren say as his ministrations slowed, paused, and the wanting in Ren’s voice ran an electric thrill in the pit of his belly, the base of his spine, went straight to the heat and ache building up low in his balls, his stiff, dripping cock. 

“Do you want to be on top?” Hux asked Ren as he reached in the nightstand drawer for the small bottle of lubricant there, watched in growing anticipation as Ren wriggled his way out of his trousers. 

“I don’t have to be.” Ren bit his lip briefly, and then the uncertainty evaporated, was replaced with his usual authority. Hux had no illusions about the kind of man he was, and sometimes he wondered what he had done exactly to deserve someone like Ren in his bed. This was one of those times.

“Look at you,” Hux whispered as he popped the cap on the bottle in his hand, “You’re blushing. Are you sure you’re ready for this?” he teased.

Ren drew a breath to reply, then just let it out in a long _ohhh_ as Hux ran lube-slick fingers carefully over his cock. His dark eyes glittered with lust and hunger as Hux squeezed more lubricant onto his hand, and then he sucked in another hard breath, his chest rising, falling quickly as Hux shifted into a low crouch to lubricate and prepare himself. 

“You won’t believe how good this feels,” Hux said as he got up to straddle Ren’s skinny hips and spread more lubricant on Ren’s cock. 

“Show me,” Ren whispered, licking dry lips, and then it was as though they were back in his austere quarters, an incense burner, a hard little pallet and a half-emptied bottle of brandy between them. 

It had been some time since Hux had last done this, and he gasped as he rocked slowly downwards, listened to Ren hiss through gritted teeth as he stretched himself open around Ren’s cock. Ren groaned softly and reached up to grab at the pillow, arched his back and thrust his hips upwards against Hux’s ass as he slid further down onto Ren. 

They paused, both breathing in heavy gasps, and then it was Hux’s turn to groan when Ren reached up and grasped his hips, thrust upward slowly and experimentally. 

“Like this?” Ren panted between thrusts, and Hux could not talk, only gasp his assent as Ren found his prostate, nudged it with another maddening push, and then he was rocking in time with Ren and seeking his own relief as Ren learned how to move him, how he liked to be moved. 

“Yes,” Hux managed to moan once and again, and then he felt Ren shudder and go very still beneath him, on the very cusp of climax.

“I can’t – ” Ren said, “Oh, Hux – you’re perfect, oh –” he managed one long sobbing breath, and Hux felt Ren’s fingers biting deep into his own hips. He reached down then to toss himself off as Ren thrust up into him, eager, spending wet and hot, and then he was coming himself, shaking, trembling around the impossible, unbearable bliss of Ren’s still-hard cock in his asshole. 

\---

Hux was sweaty and sticky with drying spunk and lubricant as he lay awake in bed, but he was also too fucked-out to move. He shut his eyes as he tried to catch his breath, listened to the roaring of his own pulse in his ears and to Ren’s breathing as he, too, sagged spent and weary on the sheets on the other side of the bed. 

“You’re not concerned about me reading your surface feelings,” Ren said after a few minutes of silence, as Hux weighed his desire for a long, hot shower against his own drowsiness. 

“No,” Hux said as he wriggled experimentally against the stained sheets. He was starting to regain sensation in his legs again. Good. Hux had spent enough time aboard starships to thoroughly appreciate the absence of water use restrictions on Starkiller Base. 

“I thought you would be more worried about it with all this classified information in your head,” Ren rolled over onto his side, and then propped himself up on an elbow, dark eyes flicking up and down Hux’s face. 

Hux shrugged absently. “The Supreme Leader knows I’m loyal. What you tell him can only confirm it.” That was true, as far as Hux would admit to himself. He still wondered at times if Ren was only associating with him in order to sniff out evidence of treason.

“Mhm,” Ren’s expression shifted from observation to pensiveness. Hux wondered if Ren was tasting his thoughts and feelings again, shrugged it off mentally. 

“Besides,” Hux continued, “Who else knows how to do this? The Jedi? They’re all dead, thanks to you.” Kylo Ren’s reputation as the Jedi Killer was something that had circulated about the First Order until it had become something closer to myth and legend. 

“Skywalker isn’t dead,” Ren said, as he rolled back over to stare at the ceiling light panels, eyes still hooded and thoughtful. 

“No, he’s just arsed off to some civilization-forsaken mudball in the rear end of the galaxy to live out the rest of his pathetic days as an irrelevant old fart,” Hux said as he swung his feet over the edge of the bed and stood up carefully, wary of a post-coital headrush. The room remained steady. Good. 

Ren did not reply to that last statement, and Hux did not proffer more conversation as he stepped into the shower cubicle and turned on the hot water. He sighed with delight as the water hit his skin, let the dash and patter and steam fill his head, and then the door opened.

“You’re getting water all over the floor,” Hux scolded gently as he scrambled to turn the shower off. 

Ren stumbled in next to him and the cubicle door swung shut of its own accord as he reached around Hux to turn the water back on. “That better?” 

“Much,” Hux said. The rest of the shower passed in silence.

\---

Hux woke the next morning at what he thought was a disgracefully late hour and ordered breakfast for two just before Catering was about to switch to their lunch menu. As a result the breadroot patties were dry and leathery, the tea stewed and bitter, and the stir-fried saltleaf was overcooked and soggy. At least the scrambled eggfruit with ground nerf was a dish that improved on holding. He dismissed the service droid, sighed briefly and then sat down at his modest dining table to read the news and his personal mail on his slate.

“I was thinking of what you told me last night,” Kylo Ren said as he emerged from the shower cubicle with a towel draped about his shoulders, his hair beginning to fall into its usual unruly state as it started to dry. 

“About closing the shower cubicle door?” Hux asked him, somewhat facetiously. “Keep doing it.”

“No,” Ren said as he sat down across from Hux. He took a sip of the tea, frowned minutely at the taste, and then started dumping sweetener into his mug by the spoonful. “About the things you know.” 

“Interesting,” Hux put his slate down, drank some of his bitter tea, “And here I thought you only wanted me for my body.” He dropped a pat of bantha butter onto his breadroot patty, waited for it to melt enough to spread. Ren’s only response was to stare at him hard as he stirred the sweetener into the tea. 

“You can probably find most of that out on your own,” Hux continued, looking back up at Ren, matching that stare with his own steady gaze. “Your clearance is probably higher than mine.” 

“That’s not what I’m thinking about. I’m thinking about what someone would have to do to make you talk,” Ren said at last. He took his own breadroot patty, tore it apart with clever fingers, and dipped a piece into the saltleaf.

“They’d have to work rather hard,” Hux said. He put the breadroot down and started on the eggfruit scramble instead. “Senior officers have to pass advanced interrogation resistance classes to receive promotions.” Hux had been through quite a bit in his education and career to date, but the weeks dedicated to those classes had been the most miserable time in his life.

“I know. I read your dossiers. But everyone talks,” Ren mused. He ate his morsel of breadroot, and then took an experimental bite of the wilted saltleaf in his bowl.

“Given time and sufficient stress, yes,” Hux said after another mouthful of eggfruit, “but that’s the point. The training is there to buy enough time for my captors to accidentally kill me trying to get me to talk, or for the First Order to eliminate me before I can.” 

“How long can you hold out, General Hux?” Ren asked as he mopped up some more gravy from his bowl of saltleaf, “That information wasn’t in the material I was privy to.”

 _Of course it isn’t,_ Hux thought. It would have been pure foolishness to pass knowledge like that around institutionally except on an absolute need-to-know basis. “Try me,” Hux said, arching a brow. Ren met his gaze then with a long predatory stare, one that made it slightly difficult for Hux to concentrate on the rest of his breakfast as he anticipated the many things Ren had started to think about right then.

\---

It took them the most of the afternoon to hash out the boundaries of Ren’s experiment.

“Can I hit you, General Hux?” Ren asked.

“As long as you don’t leave any marks outside of my uniform,” Hux said. “I have to go back on duty the day after tomorrow.” 

“Of course,” Ren reached up to run a thumb over Hux’s cheekbone, his touch gentle, possessive. “Can I choke you?”

“Only if you know what you’re doing,” Hux said as he closed his eyes in silent appreciation of Ren’s caress. Accidental brain damage was not one of his kinks.

Ren smirked then as though to say _of course I do_ , and then he continued. “Fuck you?” 

Hux shrugged. “My training covered the possibility of sexual assault as well, Lord Ren.” 

Ren stopped to give Hux a long, searching look, the expression oddly gentle and sympathetic. 

“I can’t say it was pleasant,” Hux said. It had been the platonic ideal of unpleasantness at the time, but the experience had taught him more about his limits, and that was a valuable lesson in itself. 

“Of course not,” Ren said, all business again. “Is there anything you don’t want me to do to you?” 

“No cheating with the Force, that would defeat the point of this entire exercise,” Hux said after a few moments of thought. “I’d also prefer not to have to explain anything you’ve done in Medical, so nothing permanent.” 

“So noted. Do you have any kind of password in mind, in case you want me to stop?” 

“Real interrogations don’t have safewords.” 

“No, but real interrogations don’t have boundary agreements either.” 

“Point,” Hux conceded at last. 

“Come up with one anyway,” Ren said, “just in case I get carried away.” 

Hux doubted that a password would help at all in the event that Kylo Ren did get carried away, but he came up with one anyway. “Lothal,” he said, naming his mother’s birth planet. Something easy to remember, at least, that wouldn’t come up in the interrogation. 

“And now, we make sure you have something you want to keep from me, that I won’t already know about,” Ren said, proffering Hux a dog-eared sabacc deck that he’d pilfered from one of the recreation rooms. 

Hux cut the deck to reveal The Queen, and then put the card in an envelope which he sealed without first showing it to Ren. “No cheating with the Force,” Hux reminded him.

Ren let out a soft chuckle in response to that admonition. “That would just spoil all the fun.”

\---

Hux woke up with a sudden jolt, restraints cold against his wrists, forearms and ankles, and his mind fell into contingency mode – immediately assessing his surroundings, counting backwards, estimating the time he had spent unconscious like he had been trained to do, when he remembered Kylo Ren, the negotiations yesterday, the sabacc card in a sealed envelope. That made him concentrate more on his training, on marshalling his considerable will because he knew that the Knights of Ren were the ones called in when prisoners resisted repeated rounds of interrogation.

“I’m glad you’ve decided to rejoin us, General,” Ren said. He was now entirely masked and robed, not an inch of skin showing, and he used his height to great advantage as he loomed over the interrogation chair, his battered mask just centimeters away from Hux’s face. 

Hux remained silent. It was the first, most important thing he had learned in interrogation resistance training – the less one talked, the less one was likely to slip and reveal anything. Instead he kept his breathing slow, even, tried to override the nerves he sensed lurking at the edges of his mind. 

Ren’s response to that silence was a sharp, hard slap. Hux felt his eyes start to sting from the pain, tasted blood from where his teeth had cut into the inside of his cheek, and then lifted his chin defiantly, centered his head on the restraint plastron again. 

“I’d expected more manners out of the son of Commandant Hux,” Ren said, his voice low and charged with menace through the vocabulators of his mask. “Did you just fuck your way up the ranks, General?” 

Hux did not dignify that with an answer – besides, he knew that Ren had read his personal dossiers. He had learned from previous experience that his pride was a weakness, and that insults to his ego had been the easiest ways for his instructors to find openings in interrogation resistance training. 

Ren struck him again with an open hand, and this time the slap drew tears from its intensity. He lifted his head defiantly, again, and then Ren was holding on to his hair, his grip painfully tight as he tipped Hux’s head back to expose his neck. Hux saw a faint glint of metal bouncing off something in Ren’s right hand, an indistinct shape that he soon recognized as a nerve induction probe. 

Hux sucked in a long breath against the stinging in his eyes and nose, the throb and burn of his cheek. He had spent enough time overseeing interrogations to know what was coming next. The sharp wire on the end of each probe was so fine that most subjects didn’t even bleed from its insertion, barely felt it most of the time. That wasn’t the point. The point was that nerve induction probes were designed to stimulate nociceptor neurons in a subject’s nervous tissue, causing a great deal of discomfort without actually leaving much of a mark. 

Ren slipped the probe into the soft spot behind Hux’s jaw on the left side of his neck, and the resulting jolt of pain made him stiffen, grit his teeth. Another one followed, this time in the spot where the superior fibers of his trapezius met the inner curve of his collarbone, and the wave of cramp made Hux’s teeth chatter. His head dipped forward in a sudden spasm, and the movement doubled, tripled the pain he felt behind his jaw. 

It was enough to make Hux breathe hard through his gritted teeth, but he thought he could ride out this pain, frustrate Ren enough to change tactics. He was _not_ going to lose this one, Hux thought, and then laughed bitterly internally at the ridiculousness of the situation. It wasn’t as though Ren wanted state secrets from him – but Hux would be damned if he made a habit of breaking under interrogation, and he wasn’t about to start now. 

There was a hiss of servomotors – something Hux registered on the periphery of his consciousness, and then a hard clang on the floor as Ren dropped his helmet. He leaned in close to Hux’s right ear, let his breath linger against the sensitive skin before he whispered, “I’m going to keep going.” 

Hux managed a shaky nod, and then yelped when Ren slid another probe in between his ribs. He had almost managed to forget how much that had hurt back in his advanced interrogation resistance classes, but Ren was doing a wonderful job reminding him of those days. The pain, this time, was like a fierce line of stitches down his side. Hux wanted instinctively to curl up and lessen the cramp, but the restraints held him painfully straight, and it took slow, shallow breaths to reduce the agony to a bearable degree. 

“Pain’s not going to do it for you, is it, Hux?” Ren remarked almost conversationally. 

“Hasn’t so far,” Hux managed to pant, his teeth still chattering in brief shuddery bouts, and then he gasped and tensed and mewed at the pain in his side when he gasped as Ren tilted the chair so he was lying parallel to the floor. 

“Mm,” Ren grunted softly, and then he was shucking off his layers of robes while Hux tried to regain his sense of equilibrium. The rustle of fabric seemed abnormally loud to Hux, but it registered only on the periphery of his sensorium. His ears had started to ring, and the click and scrape of Ren’s boot heels seemed oddly distant and hollow. 

Hux felt warm fingers around his left hand, a gentle reassuring squeeze, and then Ren was sliding greased fingers up his ass, the lubricant shockingly cold against the tender skin of his inner thighs, the vulnerability of his perineum. Hux wanted to gasp and arch his back as Ren stretched him gently, let his callused fingertips linger in maddening little circles on the sensitive bump of his prostate, but the probes made the movement _hurt_ , and Hux could only whimper softly as Ren slid those clever fingers out of him. 

Hux was now dimly aware through the burning in his neck and side that he was hard, harder than he had ever been in memory, and he whimpered again as Ren released the restraints on his ankles, propped his legs up and then entered him in one long, aching thrust. 

Ren fucked him roughly, stretched him open with calculated force, but the intense mix of pain and pleasure seemed to anchor him in a vague, fragile calm even as his world threatened to dwindle to the red behind his eyelids and the roar in his ears. Ren’s hard, eager thrusts threatened to sweep him away and then those strong clever fingers were closing around his neck, cutting off his air, and then Hux decided this was a good time to just surrender to the sensory overload, drift away- 

It was as though Hux were watching himself from a perspective somewhere outside of his body, as though he had ceased to be a passenger in his own flesh as Ren fucked him, and he recognized this place – a place that he had found during those weeks of starvation and cold, of instructors hurting him carefully, intimately in attempts to break him, prove him unworthy of his promotion. This place is safe, he thought, and he almost wanted to stay there forever when – 

Ren slapped him, not as hard as before, but the sting and shock were more than enough to suck him back into his body. He tried to inhale, found that Ren had loosened that merciless grip on his throat, and then sucked in a small, giddy breath of air. 

“Come back to me, Hux,” Ren whispered breathlessly, shaking from his exertions, from his own eager need, “Come back to me for just a little longer.”

Hux managed a brief nod as Ren caressed the tender right side of his face, stepped back into his skin, into the pain and bliss and absolute desperate need thrumming through every nerve of his self. Ren was gentler this time, whispering filthy incoherent things into Hux’s ear, (things that he would later lie awake thinking of while he touched himself in the voids of Ren’s absences,) and then the world was light and static and white fire blazing down his spine, setting his skull alight, spilling out of him in messy gouts as he came desperately and helplessly around Ren’s eager cock.

\---

Hux woke slowly to find that he lay still in the interrogation chair, but the restraints were off his wrists and forearms, and Ren had tucked something soft and warm around him. A blanket, he thought, and then looked down to realize that it was Ren’s inner robe. The collar was fragrant with the smell of him, strong soap, a hint of musk and sweat, standard-issue shampoo.

Hux would have been content to just lie there and drift boneless in this afterglow for hours, but he heard the scrape of boot heels beside him and turned his head to see Ren, still shirtless, rising from one of the hard little chairs placed in the room for long interrogation sessions.

“You’re awake,” Ren murmured as he reached out to run his fingers through Hux’s hair. “Are you all right?” 

Hux tried to move, sensed the utter absence of pain through the endorphin high, and then nodded.

“Your cheek’s still a little red from the slap, but it should fade by tomorrow morning.” Ren crossed to the room’s small clean-up sink, filled a small waxed-paper cup with some water. 

Tomorrow morning. Right, Hux thought. He had to go back on duty tomorrow. That was going to be a problem, because he wasn’t sure if he would be capable of movement any time sooner than next week. And then thoughts of tomorrow fled his head as Ren tipped his head up and held the cup to his lips, and the cold water was a blessing, a benediction, the best thing he remembered tasting in a long time. 

“I did okay?” Ren asked, once Hux had drunk his fill. Ren looked young and uncertain here, unlike the assured sadist from a short time ago.

“You were bloody magnificent,” Hux said as he let his head sink back down onto the restraint plastron, sighed softly in contentment as Ren tucked the robe around him again.

“Mhm. You still win, though,” Ren smiled crookedly. “Teaches me to doubt First Order interrogation resistance training. Which card was it?” 

“Does it matter? You can open the envelope yourself if you want.” The envelope was on Hux’s workdesk, in his quarters, a place that might as well have been a hundred kilometers away.

Ren only stretched his free hand out to caress Hux’s brow again, frowned slightly with concentration. Hux felt a faint, delicate touch on his thoughts; cool and careful through the warm drowsy fuzz filling his brain. “The Queen,” Ren said at last. 

“Showoff,” Hux murmured before he closed his eyes and went to sleep, the last sound he heard Ren’s soft chuckle.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope the extra-super-trashiness of this soothes some of the angst from the series? Also, I am pure, utter trash aboard the trashiest trash barge that trashed the trashy ship trash. Look at this hot mess.


End file.
